An analysis of rankings in the College Basketball Ranking Composite
Select date range for analysis
Select Year
Start
End
Different algorithms release initial rankings at different points in the season. If an algorithm's initial release is after the selected start date the algorithm is hidden from the plot and table by default. Click the above check box to show the missing algorithms.
The retrodictive accuracy of a ranking system is the fraction of games that were played before the ranking was released where the higher ranked team won. Retrodictive accuracy is updated weekly using rankings compiled by Massey.
The predictive accuracy of a ranking system is the fraction of games played after the ranking is released where the higher ranked team won. To calculate the predictive accuracy of ranking systems, rankings are downloaded from Massey at the beginning of the week and used to predict the result of the week's games. Users can select a range of dates through which predictive accuracy is calculated, which is useful for comparing accuracies of algorithms that don't have predictions for the entire season. A cumulative total of all games predicted correctly through the selected date range is divided by the total number of games played to get the predictive accuracy of each system.
Since the rankings used for this analysis are only updated once a week and do not take into account home court advantage and other factors that ranking systems may adjust for, this analysis is not fully representative of the included systems' accuracies.